Group Blog: Charting Your Journey

» Posted by Alissa on Jan 14, 2010 in Thoughts on writing | 6 comments

Today’s group blog topic, hosted by Stephanie Faris at Steph in the City is plans, specifically the plans for our literary careers. You can participate in this group blog by clicking here.

At first I was stymied by what to write about. Plans? What are those? I’m more a go with the flow sort of person. Then I read Stephanie’s story, and I realized that I too have tried out a few different plans before knowing just where I wanted to go, and believe it or not they all started when I was about ten years old.

That summer, I was going with my family on vacation to North Carolina. We had rented a condo there with a couple of other families, and were spending a week in the outer banks.

I had a plan. I was going to write a novel about that week, and it was going to be the greatest novel anyone had ever written ever. It was going to be called North Carolina (how’s that for brilliant?) and it was not going to be some silly kid’s book. No, it was going to be an adult novel (never mind that I didn’t read adult novels at the time) that was going to be a big fat 500 page book of pure literary awesomeness. In fact, it was going to be so good that Nancy Reagan herself was going to come to my town and give me an award.

What can I say? I was a strange kid.

Anyway, the reason you’ve never heard of the brilliant novel North Carolina before now is because I never wrote it. In the end that week-long vacation became nothing more than a few sentences in my cheesy little diary.

Fast forward to college, when I got into science fiction in a big time way. I was an English major so I read a lot of books, and I’m one of those people when asked to list her favorite book asks if she can pick her top 50 instead, but if there’s a genre for which I will always have a particular fondness, it is science fiction. So, when I took creative writing classes and found myself working on a novel, it was, of course science fiction. My professor asked that we pick a book whose style we liked and which we felt closely mirrored where we wanted to go with our novel. My choice was The Space Merchants by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Unlike North Carolina, some of you may have actually heard of The Space Merchants, though probably not many. It’s not exactly Catcher in the Rye. Anyway, The Space Merchants can in no way be accountable for the complete mess of a novel that I finally completed and turned in as my honors project. The funny thing is that I’ve been thinking about this novel, and its basic premise and realize that it might work really well as a young adult novel, but with completely different characters and a b-story that actually makes sense, well, for that matter, an a-story that actually makes sense.

I didn’t stop writing when I got out of school, but I’ve never been good about focusing on things so I jumped around between a bunch of different projects, including doing some work on something called The Balderdash Semesters, which did after years and years of off and on work turn into something suitable for publication, and so suddenly I realized I’m a YA author.

With that realization, my own diabolical plan was born. I am going to write some awesome young adult novels. They are going to be the kind of books I would want to read, and maybe that will bring success in the form of financial gain, and maybe not, but either way I’ll be doing what I love, and that’s pretty cool.